Two of Life’s Most Important Questions

Published on 04/03/10 by randy

Meeting the arising moment in felt sense of belonging

It seems that two of our most important questions are:

What’s my relationship with this present moment?

Do I feel loved?

Most of our restlessness and stress revolves around a bad relationship to the present moment. We’re either wishing we were someplace we were or anticipating a place we’re going to, missing the surprise of the moment.

The next question is perhaps more tricky. If I ‘feel’ loved, then by whom? If it’s a feeling from another being, am I preoccupied with what it was or fear about it’s possible loss? Or is it a bigger feeling? Perhaps it’s more a feeling of Big Hope and a bigger belonging. As the surface events of the day encounter a variety of rapids and eddies, can I hold a ‘feeling’ of being loved, with one foot on the ocean floor, grounded in the joined response, not taken by life’s surface disturbances?

This may be the big pull for theistic religions. It’s something that works me deeply. I feel great joy and comfort in a personal divine Being who has my best interests at heart. The arms of sacred love can never betray me if I dedicate to cultivating my relationship and my gratitude for the gift of the arising moment. Yet, a feeling of ‘being loved’ from a smaller group will always run the course of entropy, tied to the realm of form and the material.

So, here I am in deep loving relationship to Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and the other great divine Beings who’ve blessed me. My physical response to this love seems to resonate most with Jesus, yet my most intimate spiritual experiences have had a distinct feminine feel to them. So I pray and give thanks for this gift of opportunity to participate, to curiously explore the realm of spirit, mind and body, forever drilling deeper in this journey.

I see the poison in greed, ignorance and fear and how they play one another. In greed, I’ve lost my relation to the present, forever thirsting for ‘more’. Poof, another moment lost, another unintended harmful action. In ignorance, I’ve locked into a static notion of an answer. This is different from living faith. This is fixation on thinking I know, holding to my notion of being ‘right’. Ignorance is overcome by a curios mind, forever willing to actively listen for a deeper question. And fear is expression of my lack of ‘feeling’ love. It’s a response of feeling separate, unjoined from the Divine.

So, if I can embrace the present moment in surprise, in felt sense of being loved, my only response is that of full gratitude for the gift of opportunity. Now, this breath. Again, this breath…knowing I’m loved…knowing these breaths are limited…knowing it’s a rare gift to experience consciousness…this moment…knowing I’m in you and you’re in me and all is in all, forever bathed in the feeling of ‘being loved within the divinity of the moment’s arising’.

Cultivating the ‘Feeling of Being Loved’

When I can reflect on the ‘presence’ of ancestors who came before and upon future ancestors I’ll never meet while in this body, I’m warmed. Friends who’ve loved me beyond conditions, parents, grandparents I may never have met, someone I touched who may never had a chance to say what it meant…this ‘feeling’ comes up. And it’s my fuel for ‘Big Hope’, for knowing nothing disappears, I’m never separated, forever, each moment, filled with a deeper sense of belonging, of mattering. This ‘feeling’ of the Divine within all comes and goes. But I can grow it by taking pause, reflecting on the felt response of being loved…of Being…filled with gratitude for the opportunity of this breath, of this consciousness.